16.1. Working with the Windows Event Log

The Windows event log is a central location that is aimed at collecting all sorts of diagnostic messages. On many occasions, a program cannot display a proper error message to the user, for example, it might be running as a service that is not allowed to interact with the desktop. Quite often, the user may not be qualified to interpret an error message, and the best way to proceed is to write the error to a known location and have it interpreted by system administrators or other qualified personnel later. Domain administrators can connect to a machine's event log and retrieve entries remotely, without needing to physically walk to the user's machine. That allows for implementing monitoring solutions that ...